Deep Material Network: Overview, applications and current directions

Deep Material Network (DMN) has emerged as a powerful framework for multiscale material modeling, enabling efficient and accurate predictions of material behavior across different length scales. Unlike traditional machine learning approaches, the trainable parameters in DMN have direct physical interpretations, capturing the geometric characteristics of the microstructure rather than serving as purely statistical fitting parameters. Its hierarchical tree structure effectively encodes microstructural interactions and deformation mechanisms, allowing DMN to achieve a balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. This physics-informed architecture significantly reduces computational costs compared to direct numerical simulations while preserving essential microstructural physics. Furthermore, DMN can be trained solely on a linear elastic dataset while effectively extrapolating nonlinear responses during online prediction, making it a highly efficient and scalable approach for multiscale material modeling. This article provides a comprehensive review of DMN, detailing its motivation, underlying methodology, and recent advancements. We discuss key modeling aspects, including its hierarchical structure, training process, and the role of physics-based constraints in enhancing predictive accuracy. Furthermore, we highlight its applications in component-scale multiscale analysis and inverse parameter identification, demonstrating its capability to bridge microscale material behavior with macroscale engineering predictions. Finally, we discuss challenges and future directions in improving DMN's generalization capabilities and its potential extensions for broader applications in multiscale modeling.